Lawman's Perfect Surrender (8 page)

He looked down at her plump and ready lips. Something intimate and uncontrollable stirred. He moved the fraction of an inch it would take to press his mouth to hers. Then he jerked back as soon as he realized what he’d done. She made the world around them disappear. The sound of people talking, children playing, the country-and-western band, all of it had become white noise. He’d been so engrossed in her. In talking to her. The things she brought out of him. And above all else, simply in being with her. She led him into treacherous territory, a hurricane of dark emotion that made him seek safer waters.

Except with her, he wasn’t sure he’d find them. He felt caught between running and facing the unknown with her.

Chapter 4

A
fter enduring another three hours of enticement with Gemma, including a spectacular fireworks display, Ford dreaded going inside her house. Already he’d come up with several fantasies depicting them in a variety of inventive positions—none of them on a bed. He drew his Escalade to a stop in her gravel driveway—no doubt intentionally left that way to add to the old-fashioned charm of her home. She kept a meticulous lawn, and nothing on the exterior showed signs of a lapse in maintenance. Typical Cold Plains residence.

Ford couldn’t say Gemma was typical. Not for this town. Something about her broke down his usual precautions. Was it her vulnerability? When she wasn’t trying to escape her ex-husband she wasn’t all that vulnerable. He also couldn’t forget that she’d taken up a friendship with Lacy Matthews and had not one bad word to say about Samuel Grayson. He didn’t want to get involved with a woman who’d wind up getting a
D
tattooed on her hip.

He got out of the SUV and would have walked around to her side if she hadn’t alighted from the vehicle on her own. She’d been quiet all the way here. That quick and casual kiss could have progressed into more. He suspected she felt the same as him; the way she avoided eye contact revealed her own discomfort. Good. Maybe they’d manage this temporary living arrangement without a storm neither of them were prepared to weather.

While she fumbled with her keys to unlock the front door, he checked the street and what he could see of the covered porch. Discreetly, he drew his gun. Gemma stepped aside and let him go in first. He entered the living room, where a lamp chased shadows away. Gemma came inside and locked the door behind her, then waited there. Ford made a quick check of every room and closet downstairs then went upstairs to perform the same surveillance.

When all was clear, he headed for the stairway. With any luck he’d tell Gemma good night and retire to her first-floor guest room, alone. But when he turned the corner, he collided with her. She lost her balance with a small, startled sound, flailing her arms. Catching her around the waist, he stepped down two of the stairs to keep them both from falling. Her hands came against his biceps and her soft brown eyes peered up at his, her lips parted with residual surprise.

Their close contact arrowed straight through his armor. Storm be damned. She slid her hands up his arms to his shoulders, enough of an invitation for him. He leaned down to kiss her. She parted her lips, encouraging him more. Lifting her, he turned and put her on the step above him. Now she was more at his level, though still not taller than him.

This was just like one of his fantasies.

Impassioned beyond awareness of anything but her, he kissed her harder, the fervor to have her too much to bear. He cupped her butt. She had such a nice little butt.

Pulling back to catch her breath, Gemma’s passion poured from her eyes as she moved her hands over his chest, running one over his badge, down to the flat plane of his stomach and then back up again, until she put her palms on his cheeks. Rising up onto her toes, she kissed him reverently.

Wrapping her in a firmer embrace, he took over the kiss in a mindless attempt to assuage the fire roaring through him. She lowered her hands and he felt her fingers at the waist of his pants, at the belt that held his gear and gun.

He stopped kissing her and lifted the skirt of her sundress. She pulled it over her head. This was happening too fast. The thought came and went when she tossed the dress down onto the stair beside her and her breasts stood out at him. She was everything he’d imagined when he’d first seen her in the dress. With one arm anchoring her, he bent to take a nipple into his mouth. He was bone-hard for her. No way could he stop now.

Raising his head, he saw her face flushed with equal abandon and couldn’t wait any longer. Neither could she. She began tugging harder at his belt. Releasing her, he removed his phone and gun. She took them from him and placed them on the floor at the top of the stairs, out of the way. He slid his belt free and dropped it over the railing. Sitting down on one of the stairs, Gemma leaned backward, arching her body. All she had on was the thong that served as a patch of underwear. The sight of her drove him mad with lust.

Leaning over her, he reached for her underwear. She touched his face and he kissed her while he pulled her thong down her soft, smooth legs. Tossing it over the railing, he pushed his pants down to his ankles and knelt between her knees. He ran his hands up her calves, her thighs, over the curve of her hips, and finally to her breasts. He held them as he kissed them and tasted her with his tongue.

Her hands caressed his rear and his back muscles. He lost his breath and rose up to look at her. Rising up more, he feasted his eyes on every inch of her body.

“Damn,” he murmured. “You’re so beautiful.”

Her fingers curled around his erection and guided him to her. He hooked an arm under her waist and probed her, sinking into her wetness. Her panting breaths mirrored his.

He kissed her hard as he thrust back and forth. She put her hands against the edge of the floor at the top of the stairs to keep from bumping her head. The sight of her was so erotic, so sexually stimulating that he lost himself to it, to her and the gripping intensity of her flesh hugging him as he drove deep and withdrew.

A shattering cry erupted from her, then another, louder one. She kept crying out. He slowed and felt her contractions, doing his best to draw out her pleasure. But the sweet, slow friction drove him beyond his threshold. He thrust harder, pounding into her over and over, catapulting himself into an unbearably sensational release.

Reality returned with brutal speed. With his hands on the top step on either side of her, he met her now-uncertain gaze. Cursing himself for losing control like this, he caught his breath before facing what was sure to come. Awkwardness. Questions on what this meant. Where would it lead?

“Are you all right?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“This isn’t how I would have planned it.” He slid out of her and pulled up his pants.

“That’s a relief.” She reached for her crumpled sundress and stood to slip it on over her head.

Standing two steps down, he was almost at eye-level with her. But she avoided looking at him. His heart still hammered and he noticed her taking more breaths than normal. The aftereffects lingered.

He took her hand and that got her to look at him warily. While he was so out of sorts with what had just happened, he couldn’t leave her alone tonight.

“Let’s get some sleep,” he said, climbing the stairs.

He let go of her hand when he entered her bedroom.

She avoided looking at him again as she found a nightgown and changed in her master bath. He stripped to his underwear and got under the covers. Shyly, she came to the bed and hesitated before climbing in next to him.

“Do you want me to sleep downstairs?” he asked.

“No.” She sounded stiff.

He stared at the ceiling, wishing he didn’t have to be here. Something casual was fine. Out-of-control, frenzied passion was not. He didn’t want to feel that much with any woman. Not after being married once and losing it all. He wasn’t ready for anything that threatened to come close to that. For now, he just wanted to live without any attachments.

“You don’t have to stay here if you don’t want to.”

She’d said it because she felt she had to. A pang of guilt swarmed him. She was staring up at the ceiling, but through the shadows he saw that her face was drawn with strain, distress.

Propping his head on his hand, he touched her chin with his fingers. She looked at him.

“It’s not you,” he said. “I meant it when I said I wouldn’t have planned it that way. It just happened. I wasn’t expecting it, that’s all.” He hadn’t seen it coming. He hadn’t even thought to check for a
D
on her hip.

“I wasn’t, either.”

“I shouldn’t have allowed it to happen.” He slid his hand from her chin to the mattress between them. “I’m on duty.”

“If you’re worried about me, don’t be.”

He wasn’t convinced. “I’ll be more careful from now on.”

“I will, too. I don’t know what came over me.”

Lust came to his mind. Blindsiding lust. “You weren’t alone.”

“I’m the one who took off my dress.”

“If you hadn’t, I would have.”

She laughed a little and he was glad for the levity.

“Why do I keep doing that?”

“What, taking off your dress? You do that a lot?” he teased.

She smiled that megawatt smile of hers and he found himself enjoying her again, relaxing.

“No.” When her smile faded, she explained, “I always act on impulse. I don’t think. As a result, I end up making mistakes. Big ones.”

Knowing she meant her ex-husband, he didn’t take offense. If anything, he was relieved she wasn’t putting too much importance on this. He felt less cornered. He’d be able to do his job.

If he could keep his hands off her. The way the chemistry between them had wiped his mind clean of rational thought cast some doubt.

“How did you meet Jed?” he asked.

“I worked in a bar. Where else do you meet losers like that? It was an upscale bar, but a bar nonetheless. I was a waitress.”

“And he was one of your customers?”

“Yes. He waited for my shift to get over and I went home with him. No thought. He hung around the bar after that. We started seeing more of each other. In hindsight there were things about him that bothered me, but I didn’t do anything about it. He wanted me and that was enough.”

“Nothing stopped you from marrying him, so you did?”

“Yes.” She rolled her head to look at him. “How did you know?”

He shrugged. He knew people. He was a cop.

“Did something like that happen to you?”

And here’s when the questions started. He kept his reluctance from showing. “Not really.”

“Something similar?”

“It was different.” Much different.

With the long silence, Ford suspected she’d surmised something significant had happened, something that had made him distant with women.

“Have you ever been married?”

He didn’t answer. He couldn’t. Thinking of Wynona was too painful. The way he’d lost her…

“You don’t have to talk about it,” she said.

Again, she defused his tension. She wasn’t going to corner him. She’d recognized his difficulty and backed off. She couldn’t know what that meant to him. Her insight was keen. Her consideration for his feelings was more than that. No other woman he’d been with had trod so lightly on the tragedies of his past. It went a long way to lowering his defenses, which could turn out to be bad if he wasn’t careful.

Crawling closer to him, she rested her head on his chest and put her hand on his stomach. Warmth spread as unexpectedly as when he’d had sex with her. Letting his head sink into the fluffy pillow, he curled his arm around her.

“I grew up with my real mother, but she wasn’t much of a mother to me,” she said quietly.

The sweetness of her offering worked its way deeper into his defenses. He couldn’t talk about his past, but she would tell him about hers. No strings. No conditions, only honesty and selfless acceptance of his unwillingness to share the same.

“My dad left before I was born,” she went on. “My sister remembers him but I never met him.”

Ford began rubbing her arm with slow, gentle strokes. “You and your mother weren’t close?”

Gemma grunted with derision. “No. She needed someone to take care of her. Unfortunately, she didn’t have anything to offer a man. She couldn’t hold a job and she wasn’t very smart. She was raised by a bartender and a drug addict. Never made it through high school. My sister thinks she tried to trick our dad into marrying her and taking care of her. He wasn’t anything special, either. He worked at a gas station. Sometimes I thought she blamed me and my sister for driving him away. She always said he didn’t want kids. We grew up poor. I barely graduated from high school and started working in restaurants. Never made it far with that, though. You know the rest.”

“Jed Johnson is an orthopedic surgeon.”

She didn’t question how he knew that. “So I’m sure you can imagine my star-glazed eyes when I met him.”

“You married him because he was successful?”

“You’re a nice man for not saying
rich.
”

He chuckled. He sure liked her good-humored wit. “That explains the fountain.”

A breathy laugh answered his. “And the cases of tonic water in the shed. And the house and everything in it. I like spending his money. When it’s all gone, I’ll get a job. I don’t want to be like my mother, with nothing to offer. I read a lot. Always have. I try to stay educated, even though I never went to college.”

She didn’t care about the money. Not in a materialistic way. But most in Cold Plains wouldn’t know that. As far as they saw, she blended into the culture. Grayson’s culture. She’d come to town with a lot of money, a young, beautiful, healthy woman.

Ford let that be the end of his questions for now. Like her, he wasn’t the type to pry. Damn if he didn’t really like that about her. Most people found his dark, tragic history too fascinating to leave alone. Despite how painful it still was for him to talk about, they kept digging for more. Not Gemma. More relaxed than ever, he cautioned himself.
Don’t get too comfortable with her. And above all else, don’t fall in love.